I remember in the movie Sniper, the young sniper is holed up and ready to shoot the bad boss, but the boss and his minion both have pistols trained on the sniper's partner. He has one bullet and can't shoot both bad guys in one shot; if he shoots one, the other one will shoot his friend. So...

...he flashes back to a lecture in Sniper School about which tendon in the hand is the one that moves the index finger. He carefully aims at the hand of one of the bad guys, aiming right at the tendon. He fires, and the force of the blast makes Bad Guy One's pistol point at Bad Guy Two and kill him.

Nohbody: I'm not sure what variety of trope this would be, but in the Tom Clancy novel The Cardinal of the Kremlin, an FBI hostage rescue team is retrieving an important American scientist taken hostage by Soviet agents. In the part of the scene where the FBI team leader bursts into the room where the hostage is being held, there's comment about how he specifically aims for a bad guy's gun hand, in spite of being ready to chew out trainees trying to do "Hollywood BS".

(On the upside, though, the MAC-10 the team lead used tore up the target's gun arm, and didn't just magically nail the gun while not damaging the person holding it.)

It's worth noting also that even though a bloodless disarm is the standard in movie swordfights, most medieval methods of disarming took off several fingers to a hand.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy